The last decade has witnessed the tremendous success and popularity of Web technology that provides access to rich media and content in all forms and formats, thus enabling people to increase the range and scope of communication to a degree never before seen. Instant Messaging (IM) complements the Web by bringing people closely together in real-time and supports the dynamic and flexible nature of a conversation.
Though rich in content and media, the Web tends to be a traditional one-way broadcast medium, like radio and TV, with the largest number of people being passive information consumers; only a few percent are information publishers. People use Web browsers to find and read information. Web designers use special tools to write and publish content. Browsing and authoring are often separated. The Web was not designed to support real-time, peer-to-peer communication.
Instant Messaging (IM) comes closest to a real-world conversation in that all the participants are peers and communication happens in real-time. Generally, the content of an IM exchange is short textual messages and a conversation consists of numerous small messages sent back and forth. Messages are rendered to clients in chronological order. The messages become history once delivered and rendered, and messages are not intended to be changed by the recipients.
In the real world, people use texts, tables, forms, graphs, objects, pictures, sound and many other kinds of audio-visual assistance for communication. The contents often need to be freely referenced and updated during a conversation. A typical example is a cooperative scheduling application, where participants work on a calendar to set up a schedule for upcoming events. During the course of a session, the participants will need to make changes to the calendar and the changes will need to be synchronized in real-time. A few “round-trips” may be necessary before the final schedule can be attained. This kind of communication cannot easily be modeled in current Web or IM technology. This is because the Web has rich content but lacks real-time authoring and peer-to-peer communication. IM, on the other hand, has built-in real-time, peer-to-peer communication but lacks support for rich content and direct content manipulation.